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“Praise Abort,” Christopher Walken and Bodil Joensen

This entire entry is NSFW. And in some regards, NSFL, but if you’re reading here you’re probably made of stern stuff. But be warned – most of this entry could get you fired if your IT team at work is on the ball.

Peter Tägtgren (of Hypocrisy and Pain fame) teamed up with Til Lindemann from Rammstein in a project called Lindemann and the first single, at first listen, was a paean to sexual frustration and complete misanthropy. I’m always up for that which is sexually uncomfortable and I sort of loathe most of humanity, so “Praise Abort” was up my alley. It was also deeply funny and we need more humor in music, I think. God knows “Praise Abort” would be a complete mental massacre without some humor.

I’ve not followed Peter Tägtgren’s career that closely. When I was but a wee lass, I listened to Hypocrisy from time to time. I checked out Pain on YouTube and the first video that came up was for a song called “Shut Your Mouth.” Tägtgren is obviously not a dude adverse to humor in his music, and the video for “Shut Your Mouth” verges into silliness. But whether or not you like humor in your metal, how can you not like a song with a chorus like “Just wipe your own ass and shut your mouth!”

And because I am a hopelessly shallow woman, I can say that now that I know that Peter Tägtgren is no longer a metallic ringer for Johnny Depp

and is transforming into Christopher Walken, I find him far more interesting and can see myself checking out more Pain once this discussion is completed.

And I think we are all familiar with Rammstein. Video is heavily edited from the original but I think you’ll get the gist of it.

So it’s not unexpected that a collaboration between Tägtgren and Til Lindemann would produce the following:

Wow. I need someone to promise me no piglets were harmed in the making of this video. They look like they got flung around quite a bit though I guess that could be piglet CGI. But above and beyond the limp and flung piglets, this video disturbed me in a way that seemed oddly familiar though I could not put my finger on it immediately.

I showed this video to Mr OTC and his first reaction was to begin laughing when Lindemann stretches out on the piano and sings

I hate my life and I hate you…

Then he asked, “These are Germans, right?” Even though Tägtgren is Swedish, Mr OTC seemed vindicated when I told him Lindemann is indeed German.

But it was the fact that Tägtgren is Scandinavian that allowed me to understand why this video was niggling at the back of my brain. Given how often bestiality ends up a topic on this site – completely inadvertently, I swear – it should have been obvious. Humans coupling with pigs + Scandinavia = Bodil Joensen.

Bodil Joensen was a broken Danish woman who starred in and produced bestiality porn. She grew up with a whacked-out Christian mother who beat her and who demonized her further after Bodil was sexually assaulted at age 12. Bodil ran away at age 15 and began to work for farms, eventually setting up her own animal husbandry business. That venture floundered for a number of reasons and Bodil, to make ends meet, began posing nude and engaging in vanilla porn.

Bodil developed a very close bond with her animals. This is a statement that seems obvious on its face – she had sex with animals, including pigs. But for Bodil this was not an act of degradation or simple performance for money but more of a genuine romantic attachment to and deep love for her animals. Bodil would have been having sex with her animals whether or not a camera was focused on the scene. But the notoriety caused by her livelihood combined with the misery of her youth and the alienation that drove her into creating carnal bonds with animals caused her to become an alcoholic and an addict. Chronically broke, she permitted sex tourism on her farm with her animals. She eventually drank herself to death when she was only 40.

The worst part about Bodil’s decline, aside from leaving behind a young daughter, was that in the last years of her life, she neglected her animals to the point that it left the realm of neglect and entered into abuse. In 1981, a few years before her death, her farm was raided and her animals were taken away and every single one ended up euthanized because they simply could not be saved. Her chaotic life, self-loathing and addiction made it impossible for Bodil to sustain the creatures that had sustained her financially and emotionally.

Her sad, sordid story is told in this documentary. Definitely worth a look. If nothing else it’s a look at the very lax pornography situation in Denmark in the ’70s.

Most people react with disgust toward Bodil. Her life was pretty unsettling and given my germ-phobia and fussy housekeeping, the whole of her interaction with animals, including having livestock living in her home as if she were some Middle-Ages dairy maid, makes me nervous. But once my contamination fear is tamped down, I feel such sympathy for Bodil. Some of us are born with wiring that causes us to embrace what I can only call the unclean – coprophilia, necrophilia, bestiality. I am unsure if Bodil had such wiring – she once told her mother she would fuck animals in order to get revenge after her mother spent a lifetime condemning and beating her, so perhaps the whole attraction was a byproduct of vengeance. But I tend to think she became a zoophile as a result of continual human rejection, working on farms in order to express her zoophilia. Some of us are born with paraphilias – some are twisted up by life until we develop maladaptive coping mechanisms. I think Bodil was the latter, but bear in mind my opinion is just one of thousands.

I haven’t read any interviews with Peter Tägtgren or Til Lindemann regarding this song or Lindemann as a whole but I don’t think they were thinking of Bodil when they wrote “Praise Abort,” a song of misanthropy, self-hatred and thwarted sexual will. Then again, maybe they did. I’m not sure this is a song I will be adding to my mp3s any time soon but the video is certainly provocative for most and evocative for the right people. And by right people I mean people like me who find themselves crawling around in dark places online in the middle of the night, insomnia ensuring they see Til Lindemann wearing pig teats and think of Bodil Joensen.